


No courage in him

by Naraht



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Marriage, Queer Character, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 07:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things turn out badly for Nurse Adrian and, incidentally, for Laurie too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No courage in him

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



> Me husband can dance and caper and sing  
>  And do anything that's fitting for him  
>  But he cannot do the thing I want  
>  Because he's got no courage in him
> 
> Oh dear-o ! oh dear-o !  
>  My husband's got no courage in him.
> 
> \--Traditional

She never had any idea what had got into Laurie that night.

He'd come back to the E.M.S. Hospital a few weeks after he'd been transferred away. Looking for Andrew Raynes, he'd said, but he found her instead. They'd been having a party in the nurses' common room that night, using the gramophone that Corporal Odell--that Laurie--had left behind when he went.

He'd stayed for the party. Stayed, and danced with her (swaying in place), and held her close. The song on the gramophone was _We'll Meet Again_ and she'd thought that it was meant for the two of them alone.

Both of them drank too much, perhaps. Perhaps just enough. What they did that night was something that she had never expected to do with anyone but her future husband, and yet it was exactly what she had dreamt of ever since Laurie had kissed her in that country lane.

Afterwards she realised that he was far more drunk that she had thought. He murmured something incoherent about what a friend had said, "two years of trawlers," and then he burst into tears. She held him for what felt like hours, but must have been only minutes, rocked him until the air raid siren broke them apart.

It was just the reverse of their encounter in the lane. It was just as mysterious and just as compelling as the drugged half-secrets that he'd whispered to her after his last operation. When the raid was done he looked at her in confusion, as though he'd been talking to someone else altogether.

"It's all right," she said, patted his hand like he was still one of her patients.

"It isn't, really," said Laurie. "I'm so sorry. You'll see. It isn't right at all."

***

Two months later she believed him. 

She hadn't seen him since that night. She called the hospital in Bridstow but they told her that he had been discharged weeks earlier.

Finally she remembered that he had said he was going back up to his college at Oxford. She took her stationary into the bathroom, the only place where she could be certain of not being interrupted. Sitting on the edge of the big bathtub, which had been scrubbed so clean by the COs, she began to write.

> Laurie Odell  
>  Balliol College  
>  Oxford  
>  Oxfordshire
> 
> Dear Laurie,
> 
> I think I am going to have a baby…

***

Her father got them a special license and performed the marriage in their parish church. Everyone conspired to pretend that there was nothing wrong: her parents and sisters and brothers, Laurie's mother and his stepfather, also a vicar. All of the guests were blithe and gay except Laurie's aunt, who gave her a look that she couldn't quite decipher.

It was a wartime wedding in February and they hadn't the coupons for a wedding dress. She shivered on the church steps in her best suit until Laurie gallantly put his overcoat around her shoulders. She tried to smile for the pictures but she had to blink the tears from her eyes. 

Her sister had brought her a bouquet of early daffodils and she held them up against her face, hoping that they would reflect some colour into her pale cheeks.

"I'm sorry," she said to Laurie that night, as they lay together in the master bedroom of their new home, the cottage where Laurie had grown up. "I couldn't think what else to do. I just knew I had to tell you…"

Yesterday she had been a girl, a nurse, nineteen. Today she was a married woman and she hardly knew how it had happened.

"You mustn't apologise," said Laurie. "You did the right thing. You mustn't ever tell yourself otherwise."

"I don't regret a thing," she said stoutly, telling herself that perhaps she could believe it.

Laurie said nothing. After a long pause he pulled her into his arms and together they shivered in the chilly night, as frost formed on the windowpanes.

***

The baby was born on a hot day in August, as unlike their wedding day as could be imagined. A boy, seven pounds one ounce, with strawberry-blond hair. They named him Patrick Ross Odell.

She was in hospital for a week afterwards, sweltering under a thin sheet as she listened to the drone of the radio at the end of the ward. She dreamt of the Atlantic Charter, blue waves breaking on a shore somewhere, convoys making their weary way across the ocean. 

Laurie sat and held her hand as she had once held his. He brought her a bowl of cherries picked from the tree in the churchyard.

"He's beautiful," said Laurie. "I never thought that I'd have a son."

***

That was the first time they lived together as husband and wife. All spring she had been alone in the cottage while Laurie finished his degree at Oxford. Now they were three, she and Laurie and the baby with his high, thin wail.

She worried about the strangest things. In a corner of the sitting room, Laurie's old fencing foil stood leaning against the wall, and though the baby was still a mite in his cradle she worried that one day he would crawl up to it and cut himself. But Laurie refused to put the foil up in the attic.

In the spring she had dreamt about having Laurie at home, imagined the things they would talk about. Now that he was here she hardly saw him. She was busy with the baby and he would spend hours up in his study, reading Plato as if his finals were just around the corner and not months past. His knee troubled him, she thought, and his memories of the war. He never told her what nightmares woke him in the night, soaking with sweat. He never touched her except in those moments.

As September wore on she began to take the baby for walks, long rambles in country lanes pushing the heavy pram. Laurie said she went too quickly for him to keep up.

One afternoon when she came back to the cottage, she saw an unfamiliar car parked in the street. The baby had fallen asleep in the pram and she meant to leave him to take the air, on the front walk by the door.

It wasn't that she meant to overhear. The voices came through the open sitting room window as she stood tucking the blanket around her son.

"I wish it were different," Laurie was saying. "But I can't leave him the way my father left me."

"I know," said a man's voice, gentle and frayed and strained to breaking point. "I know you can't, Spud."

Outside the window, she wept.


End file.
